The present invention relates generally to performing analytics on mobile device data, and more particularly to analyzing mobile device data to determine mobile subscriber characteristics.
As the population of individuals using cell phones and other mobile devices has grown, location-based services have become increasingly important. Location-based services are a general class of computer program-level services used to include specific controls for location and time data as control features in computer programs. As such, location-based services are information services and have a number of uses in fields including social networking, city planning, disaster recovery, entertainment, convenience, and utility, and use data collected from mobile devices through a mobile network and which use information on the geographical position of mobile devices for various purposes. Many location-based services currently just provide the location of the mobile device user (i.e., the mobile subscriber). These are usually used to provide information to the subscriber based on the specific location of the subscriber (e.g., location-based services can provide a list of nearby restaurants, etc.). Location-based services can be valuable to marketing companies to send campaigns and to predict future flow of traffic, for example. The limitations of current location-based services include, for example, their inability to scale to large volumes of mobile device data.